Selflessness and Chirstmas

For this post during the week of Christmas I would like to share with you a short quotation from the late Bishop Fulton Sheen whose cause is being considered for canonized sainthood.

“What a lesson nature teaches about selflessness! Clouds, playing like lambs in the pastures of the sky, never keep their treasures of moisture to themselves, but pour them out in the beautiful benediction of rain to a thirsty earth. No drop of water leads a selfish life. There is no breeze without its mission. Human lives were not sent into this world as ornaments. God has prettier things for that purpose. As the bird that sings for others gladdens its own heart with song, as rivers flee the decay of stagnant self-content to service the mighty ocean, as the sun burns itself out to light a world, so does everything – man included – become good by doing good to others.

But if we are to do good to others, they must be loved for God’s sake. No moral profit comes from doing good to another because “she can get it for us wholesale” or from giving gifts to others because of the pleasure they give us. There is not even great merit in doing good to those who love us. “If you love those who love you, what reward is there in that? Do not sinners do the same?” (Luke 6:32). The greatest spiritual profit comes from loving those who hate us, and from giving gifts and dinners to those who cannot give anything in return, for then recompense will be made in the Kingdom of heaven (cf Luke 14:12-14).”[1]

This is just what God the Father has done for us by sending to us His only begotten Son, we who have nothing except that which is already His, we who are not always His friend but have been His betrayer by our sins. Yet He gives us Jesus anyway for He loves us to such a perfect extent. What then should be our response to this perfect love? Shouldn’t it be the same as Mary’s at the annunciation? Shouldn’t we say yes to God with our whole selves[2] ? This is one of the reasons why I think the national holiday of Thanksgiving is appropriately placed the month before Christmas and it initiates Advent with a right spirit of thankfulness. Thank you God for your wondrous, perfect and Holy goodness. Thank you God for redeeming us in Christ. Thank you God. Alleluia!

12And he said to him also that had invited him: When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor thy neighbours who are rich; lest perhaps they also invite thee again, and a recompense be made to thee.

13But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind;

14And thou shalt be blessed, because they have not wherewith to make thee recompense: for recompense shall be made thee at the resurrection of the just.

CCC 142-143

¶142 By his Revelation, "the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company." The adequate response to this invitation is faith.

¶143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, "the obedience of faith".

The Compendium to the Catechism says that our response to God should be an “obedience of faith, which means the full surrender of ourselves to God and the acceptance of his truth, insofar as it is guaranteed by the One who is Truth itself.” CCC 142-143 [↩]

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